Moon surveying

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Contents

Scanning moons

Before you can do moon mining it probably pays to find out what it produces first. This can be achieved by moon surveying. Moon surveying is an activity which involves flying to a moon and launching a probe into it to find what raw materials it contains

You can probe any moon in 0.3 security space and below

WARNING: warping to a moon which already has someone's POS residing there will likely result in a swift and pretty damn quick episode of wtfpwnd. A POS turret can pop your industrial in one shot

What do you need

  • An industrial (or any ship with lots of CPU and cargo space)
  • Moon probe launcher
  • Moon probes

Fitting your ship

I advise to use an industrial. Reason being, moon probe launchers take an enormous amount of CPU and the moon probes themselves are 100m^3 in volume each

Fit your favorite industrial as follows:

A single system will have anything from 5 to 50 moons and you will need a moon probe for each moon you want to survey

How to survey

Now you have your fitted industrial and probes, fly to the planet of the moon you want to scan. Note I said planet and not moon. The reason for this is if you fly directly to a moon, and it happens to have a POS there, you will get wtfpwnd and the owner will get a nice little EVEmail telling him his POS just pwned you. Worse still you don’t want to carelessly loose 20 million ISK worth of probes.

So do NOT warp straight to a moon.

When you arrive at the planet, open your scanner and do a 360 degree scan at max km range. Sort the results and look carefully down the list. What you are looking for is a Control Tower. If you see one on the list then you know one of the moons has a Control Tower, therefore it’s likely to have defences that will gank you if you warp to it.

If you don’t find any CT then you may proceed to scanning. If you find a CT you have to then isolate which moon it is at so you can avoid it. You could do a directional scan on each moon but unless you are really good at space scanning it’s probably not a good idea.

The best and fastest way to find where the POS is as follows:

  • Create a mid-space safespot.
  • Bookmark the safespot.
  • Eject from your industrial (Note: When you eject, your skills wont apply for your ships

cargo bonus anymore so your probes may be jettisoned in a can next to you).

Warp to each moon at 60km in your pod. POS defences do not pod people so you are safe, however players do so don’t hang around! As soon as you find which moon the POS is at, make a note so you can avoid it.

Warp back to your safespot bookmark and jump back into your industrial.

Due to the lengthy process of moon surveying you should really try to do it when you have no one in the system. Many corporations have big interests in particular systems and moons, and will hunt you down if they find you in there trying to eat their cake.

Surveying

Now that it’s all clear, warp to the Moon of your choice at 15km.

  • Fly to moon: On arrival you may not see the moon as moons vary in size and shade (but you will be 5km from it). Go to your overview settings and check to show moons. Now simply click the moon on the overview to highlight it.
  • Aligning to moon: This is the hardest part. Align yourself as central to the moon as possible, this will be difficult because double clicking in the middle of the moon will highlight it instead of making you approach it, also some moons are very small. Double click on the moon but just slightly off the center. Activating your MWD helps you get a good speed on approach which helps you judge your line up to the moon.
  • Fire probe: When you are 100% sure you are aligned and that the probe when launched will hit the moon then launch the probe by clicking the Probe Launcher Module. The probe will shoot out the front of your ship with a “whoooosh” and head in a straight line towards the moon. If you didn’t align properly, the probe will miss the moon (probe communication failed).

Once you have launched the probe, open your scanner. It will show the probes countdown time until it returns results. You will also notice there is a new tab in the scanner window called ‘Moon Analysis’, your results flash in there once the timer hits 0. You can move on to the next moon whilst the probe is en route to the moon, you do not have to wait until the probe hits it and you do not have to wait until a scan is finished, just keep your scanner window open and continue your surveying.

WARNING: If you leave the system, change ship, or dock, your scan results will be lost. You have to stay in the system to receive the results.

This is where the cloaking device on your industrial comes in handy. At the end when you are still waiting for the last few results, warp to a safespot and cloak. By cloaking others looking for you with scan probes will not find you and you can peacefully go AFK or jot down the results on paper. OK, so all scans are now completed and the Moon analysis tab is flashing furiously. Click it and examine what is there. If a moon does not have any materials you will receive a pop up message after the scan telling you so.

The results are listed by planet and moon. Clicking one will expand it to show what raw materials can be harvested from that particular moon. Next to the name of the raw material you have the abundance which refers to the batch quantity that could potentially be harvested. Abundance may range from 1 to 4. It’s now up to you to decide if the raw materials found at a specific moon are worth harvesting. Remember, a POS is not a toy, they require a lot of maintenance and operation. The moon you choose has to be profitable enough to make it all worth it unless you will be covering the cost by 0.0 mining. Also, take into consideration your location, if you are in hostile space ask yourself how easy will it be to get fuel there?

Skills Needed

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